


A Minor Celebration

by musamihi



Category: House of Cards (US TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 11:52:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2811056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During their respective careers at Harvard, Frank and Claire enjoy a post-exam evening to celebrate: progress.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Minor Celebration

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arem/gifts).



Frank rather hated Cambridge, low and flat and self-consciously grubby; and so to unwind into what little was left of the holiday season after the better part of it had been chewed away by papers and examinations, he came to the city proper. Among the buildings huddled against the winds from Boston harbor and shielding the plain of the Commons, Marliave was unassuming, dim and a little sooty on the outside like almost all of its neighbors just down the hill from the State House. Within, it was cheerful, warm, decorated thickly with garlands and lights and red-faced men in ill-fitting suits pompously calling one another _representative_ with that broad, barking holler characteristic of their state. He sat with Claire at the marble bar, accompanied by a bottle of champagne (which she had ordered, having arrived first - a gesture he'd repay after dinner, and a small victory he'd attempt to reclaim the next time they had some minor celebration) and an icy pewter tray of oysters. The bartender, as he laid out their napkins, was paying Claire his particular attention, in Frank's estimation leaving the line between congeniality and flirting well behind his heels. He approved entirely, and warmed to the man at once. It was so easy to have affection for people who paid tribute to things you loved, who saw the value in the people you had deemed most worthy. 

Claire was amused, he could tell, but she somehow turned what might have been mocking into a friendly spark. The sharpening of her smile could to the untrained eye have been joy or awe, particularly when coupled with that soft accent of hers that was, here, more likely to be taken as evidence that she was delighted to hang on some stranger's words. In a city that prided itself simultaneously on its sophistication and its salt, she was exotic for her drawl and for the simplicity that it implied - not the flat, direct pragmatism of Buckley's Boston telephone directory, but a sort of hothouse innocence. 

"You're very quiet," she said, resting her hand on his knee when the bartender had passed on. Her glass was poised just beside her chin, and there was a certain promise of confidentiality in that gesture; the lights from the garland woven through the bottles of gin reflected, hazy, through that gold. 

"My brain's still a mush of antitrust. There's nothing in there but - predatory pricing, penalty ties." But he smiled and clicked his glass to her - the fourth or fith time tonight. "When I'm capable of decent conversation again, you'll be the first to know."

"You found it challenging?" 

"Not challenging." Sitting down for three hours to attack a series of propositions was more or less his natural element. "Tedious. It's a useless subject, I think - all of its underlying principles are easily available elsewhere. All the strategy is pretty simple stuff. There's not much independent value to be gleaned."

"So why did you take it?"

"Oh, I don't know." He gave her a weary look, undergirded with something like irony. "There's just something irresistible about _competition_ , I suppose."

That earned him a flicker of that impatience - no, impatience was too strong a word for the cool and summary dismissal of nonsense that she effected with no more than a drop of her eyes to the crumpled lemon on the tray. "That isn't why."

"Well. No." And there it was; he could feel himself coming to life a little. _Challenging_ , she'd said. No skating by with easy platitudes, no empty banter. "No. Just a joke."

Her little curl of a smile as she slipped down another oyster let him know just what she thought of it. Which was, of course, perfectly fair.

"I had a reason. I'll remember it someday, I'm sure. But that's one of the dangers of a thing like law school, you know - where the end is a license, there's no need for the process to be anything but a long slog of a scavenger hunt. It's just collecting widgets, and it doesn't matter what they are. If, at the end of the day, you can present enough of them, they'll give you a degree, no matter what color or shape they are or if they fit together into anything useful. And if you can hand enough of them back to the bar examiners, they'll give you a right to use your piece of paper. It can be so easily wasted; it _is_ so easily wasted."

"You won't waste it." She had a neat trick of making certainty an admonishment; or maybe it was the other way around. "Even where the substance isn't of use, there's something to be gained. There's always something to learn."

"There is. Even if it's just which of your classmates are fawning, bootlicking idiots who'd treat a lecture on dust like pearls of wisdom if it came from someone who once worked at OLC."

She laughed, this time, and drank. "That seems like something you should be able to figure out with a handshake."

"It was. Sometimes I allow myself to hope I'll be proved wrong."

She reached over to press his hair behind his ear, indulgent. "We all have our moments of sentiment."

"We do. I'm having one right now."

"Well, then." She straightened, prim, the perfect line of her back accentuating the sly angle of her glance as she hid her amusement behind the rim of her glass. "I'd better stop."

"That's all right. I haven't got anywhere else to be." He felt his mind honing in, coming back to itself after his plodding day of laying rails for a journey that sometimes seemed like it would never start. "Ee should get married."

"You really are in a state." She looked at him fondly, but appraisingly. She never let him slouch - he loved that, loved that in the way he loved the cold moments of perfect stillness in the dark and snow of a city that was old, and loved its age, and looked forever into its own decaying heart like a lotus-eating emperor that would someday crumble under the weight of its cherished admiration, and leave - only him, the last vital entity left in a pile of sluggish and self-satisfied rubble. "We haven't got the time, Francis."

"No," he sighed. "You're right. Give me another glass and some of that Sunday gravy, and I'll be right as rain again. I'm hardly fit for public consumption."

She helpfully scooped some horseradish onto a shell for him. "Start with a little pep."

He ate it obediently, accepted another glass when the bartender came around again, and, when the host stopped at his shoulder to say that their table was, at long last, ready, he did feel better - and with her hand curled into the bend of his arm they climbed the stairs to the dining room, leaving the din and the slightly disheveled products of the halls of power below, retreating to something quieter, something more measured; their table by the window from which they could see just a sliver of the darkened, ancient graveyard where so many great men lay cold and increasingly forgotten.


End file.
